So I definitely plan to continue supporting this mod going forward, but wanted to fill you all in on what I was thinking as far as next steps/projects.

The original mod creator and myself both envisioned a type of gameplay based off the show "The Expanse" (great show if you haven't watched it btw).

In the series you have earth a few hundred years from now, and what things might look like as we colonize the solar system without unifying earth first, and the political chaos that ensues.

My plan from this point is to develop these mods as follows:

Pre-FTL Players - Complete and functional, though I'm open to ideas or modifications as you think of them.

Resource Rich Galaxy - Complete. Small re-balance of the size of deposits in space. Increases the resources you find to something I feel would be more realistic.

Primitive Players - Partially complete. Idea is you start off in a similar situation to the base game's primitives. No starbase, no corvettes, no science ships, just a 5 military power primitive space station, and your ground loving selves :) Each tech would need to be researched for pretty much everything, and this would include the Pre-FTL Players drives and FTL progression. (Much of the code comes from Pode, the original creators mod "Primitive Players". All the code is from 2.0 and it's a touch tricky to get it all working again.)

Colonize Everything - Lets you colonize (almost) everything.

Nuclear Winter - Basically an event chain that is based on the idea that your primitive world from before has multiple nations on it, all on the brink of nuclear war. If nuclear war happens, pops die, your world turns to a tomb world, and you get a stability modifier that goes down over the next 20 years. AKA bad stuff... don't do it.

Space is Hard - Introduces the idea of a planetary UN that exists until you research planetary unification. The tech only appears after your planetary centralization reaches 100. Meant to go along with the Nuclear Winter mod. You can be elected president, and enact decisions that increase centralization, but may cost energy, minerals, alloys, or influence. Sets the game start date to 2020. Utilizes tech tree from Primitive Players, but also adds several development techs (basically "early armor" "early mass drivers" etc.). Also changes the primitive station to be a new megastructure type that upgrades into an early shipyard for your early corvettes and early science ship etc. One use construction ships in your home system. All of these with a slowed down chemical thrusters, and unexplored home system. Also would introduce a probe-class that is one of your earliest ship techs. It would let you explore your home system without having to send any fragile people into space.